22 Donzi Hornet, which looked rather like a LIncoln Continental convertible. ( We found, in general, that boats are becoming more and more like cars.) The Donzi Hornet costs eight thou- sand dollars and can do better than seventy miles an hour . "We offer in- stant kingship to the man who buys it," Allan Brown, the Donzi operative, said proudly. "He's automatically the fast- est guy at the yacht club." We descended a series of moving companIonways to the ground floor and pulled up at the yards of the Fisher- Pierce Company, makers of Boston Whalers-puffy, snub-nosed little Fi- berglas barges. ( Wood, we learned, is as outmoded in boats as it is in cars.) "The Boston Whaler is the V olks- wagen of the boat business," the yards' operative said. "Boston Whalers never change. They're unsinkable." We moved on to the marina of Kayot, which bills itself as "World Leader in Pontoon Funcraft," and inspected a Kayot Captain-a sort of raft on a pair of steel pontoons, with a canopy over- head. "It's made for fun," said Mr. Richard Eagen, the cheerful skipper of the Funcraft. "You can have cocktail parties on it. We had a couple get mar- ried on one of our pontoon boats." Hav- ing skirted a number of powerboats wIth huge automotive tail fins, we decided to try our luck on another floor, where we discussed a flotilla of Fiberglas kayaks with their captain, who represented the Klepper CorporatIon, the New York subsidiary of a German firm. "\Ve're doing a land-office business up North, selling them to Eskimos," he said. Far- ther along, we almost stumbled over a Sea Dart-a tiny Fiberglas motorboat, only eighty-two inches long, which, like a small rubber raft, is ridden stom- ach down, legs dragging in the water. It is powered bv a twenty-two-horse- power engine and can do thirty miles an hour . "You feel as though you had a rocket by the tail," Nicholas Mielcarek, salesman for Sea Dart, said "It has a deadman's switch, so it's as safe as a ch urch." We moved on to the third floor to look at tackle, gear, and accessories, which turned out to be mostly of plastIc. At Teleflex-Ongaro, manufacturers of marine products, we hove to and ex- amined some steering wheels for boats. "Some are made of tenite buterate, just like automobile steering wheels," Roy Bergey, helmsman for Teleflex-On- garo, said. "We also manufacture pow- er-steering units, throttle and clutch controls, and instrument panels-in short, we have everything for the bIn- nacle, which means dashboard." At the Atlantic-Pacific Manufacturing Corpo- ration's stall, we inspected a variety of life preservers: circular type, jacket type, and the newest type of all-a sort of horse collar made of plastic. "Polyvinyl- chloride is as buoyant as cork," the sales- man said. "For a long soak, give me plastic every time." We upped anchor and headed for the Industrial Timer Corporation, dispens- ers of air horns, where the operative in vited us to listen to a tape recording of the Cruiser Deluxe horn. What we heard was a plaintive, blaring note- a hundred and seventeen decibels. The horn runs on twenty-two pounds of air pressure and will make SOlneone a mile away Jump. Next, We consulted Mr. William H. Gardiner, vender of Z- Spar marine and anti-fouling paints that are guaranteed to discourage barnacles and borers. "The paint sets up a poisoning action in the water and keeps exudIng a leaching type of toxin-tri- butal tin oxide if the paint is red or yellow, or cuprous oxide if the paint is one of our blues or greens," Mr. Gar- diner said. "As far as we know, it won't poison fish, but the Department of Agriculture is checking." We turned our attention to rope at the Samson Cordage Works, and learned from the sales manager, Mr. Robert Billings, that hemp is out and Dacron, nylon, and polyethylene are in. "Dacron rope is expensive but low on stretch Nylon is cheaper but stretches more. Poly- ethylene is cheapest but poor on abra- sion," Mr. Billings said, supplying the raw materials of a future nautical adage or sea chanty. He continued, "Samson braided rope is the Cadillac of ropes. We've outfitted the last three America's Cup defenders. Samson rope slings are used in space-capsule recovery. Our rope helped fish John Glenn out of the drink." He gave us a sample of line, and not far away we found an anchor to put on the end of it. "Our anchors are nine ways better than any others," Jerry E. Jensen, of the Brewer- Tichener Corporation, said. "There's a patented crossarm, so that which- ever way you throw the anchor over the sIde, the flukes are guaranteed to hit the bottom at a fighting, thirty- five-degree angle in a downward, attack posItIon. There's immediate penetration of the bottom. No drag." Tf'hen in Rome ^ N Orient-minded Manhattan cou- 11 pIe recently invited a newly landed Japanese graduate student to what he gratefully informed them was his first dinner party in an American home. The young man proved to be ex- tremely mannerly, and it was clear that he had been boning up on American social usage; in fact, hIS only lapse, if it can be called that, came when, acting on his host's suggestion that he might like to wash up before eating, he went into the bathroom and took a show'er. Foss B '(TFFALO, which we have always tended to think of as a nice city to live in but no place to visit, has taken on a whole new cultural aura for us as the result of a half hour's brisk chat we've had with Lukas Foss, the composer. Mr. Foss, who is now in his second season as conductor and musical direc- tor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, was in d 1 . " I " town to elver a ecture-concert at Hunter College, during which two of his latest compositions were to be per- formed. Catching him one afternoon between rehearsals and other appoint- ments, we picked him up at his hotel and accompanied him around the corner to a coffeehouse on West Fifty-sixth Street, where he asked for a table as far away from the canned music as possible. He was no sooner seated than he began to describe the remarkable flowering of the arts in his adopted city. "Things are really lively in Buffa- lo," he told us "You would hardly be- lieve all that's going on. Of course, there is the Albright-Knox Gallery, which everybody knows about, and which at- tracts the artists, but now the State U ni- versity of Buffalo has started to attract the writers and poets, and the Philhar- monic is doing all sorts of thIngs-new things-that interest the musicians. On top of which, we have our new Center for Creative and Performing Arts, and in February we are putting on the Buf- falo Festival of Arts. Do you know about that? Ionesco is coming over from Paris to put on three of his plays, and there will be a great exhibition of kinetic art, and heaven only knows what else. I've scheduled a week of concerts de- voted exclusively to the music of the last ten years. Not even Schoenberg, mind you-just the last ten years. That's really revolutionary!" A waItress came up to take our order,